D-Day

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War is hell. So's this game.

By Mark Birnbaum

The real time strategy genre has seemingly reached its plateau. Save the rare intuitive masterpiece, most of today's RTS games are uninspired, generic, and sometimes just plain sloppy. Unfortunately, Digital Reality's latest realization is just that: a generic, uninspired, and sloppily executed game set in a time period that seems to be the most overused in gaming today. But even the excitement of the Second World War isn't enough to redeem this title.

June 6, 2004 commemorated the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. Hoping to cash in on the big hype surrounding the anniversary, D-Day seemingly entirely missed the Higgins boat. About 6 months too late in the calendar year, and 6 months too early in its development cycle, gamers worldwide are forced to bask in the horror that is D-Day.

The game begins in the early hours of June 6th 1944 as the Allies prepare to drop behind enemy lines to cutoff reinforcements to the beaches. The successful airdrop would ensure a strong foothold for the landing and enable Allied troops to overwhelm German strongholds. But everyone knows that by now. The movies between missions are comprised of stock war footage that doesn't really show anything people haven't seen before. The narration describing the forthcoming mission is adequate, but doesn't really inspire you to fight for Western freedom. It seems as if there was a great deal of time spent on creating movies when the time really should have been devoted to improving the gameplay.

The game starts off with a needlessly lengthy tutorial that really lacks in its tutoring abilities; mastering the interface is a feat worthy of Guinness Book of Records fame. There are twelve single-player missions split into three chapters. Upon the completion of missions in the campaign mode, you can replay them in Scenario mode. The objectives remain the same but the player is given the ability to modify the starting units. Yay!

The latest trend in RTS seems to be the general abandonment of resource collection, enabling the gameplay focus to be on conquest rather than micromanagement. This is all well and good when your units are appropriately represented and displayed on the screen. Here it is often difficult to distinguish between the various infantry units, making coordination in battle most difficult. The player will often be granted reinforcements as the mission progresses, but for the most part the units provided at the beginning of the mission are the only units. This is made more frustrating by the fact that more often than not, as you drag the box over your units and command them to a destination, some will inexplicably be left behind, causing your forerunners to get mowed down by German machine gun nests.

The ability to commandeer abandoned vehicles using your men is interesting, especially when you have a commissioned officer command the vehicles, increasing its strength and effectiveness. But this all goes to waste due to terrible AI, limited pathfinding capabilities, and a poor camera system. When given coordinates, your units will often bump into each other, go the long way, or move out of formation, increasing vulnerability and escalating the probability of total annihilation.

Keeping an eye on your troops is even more difficult. The camera is fully 3D, but actually positioning it in a manner that displays all your troops at once is not only a daunting task, but often an impossible one. I more than once found myself cursing as I couldn't swing my camera around to simply coordinate both my infantry and my armor to attack the same target. There was another instance in which you are required to take out some German guards from a distance using your sniper. Ok, no problem. Wait, where's my sniper? The inability to distinguish between various units can become a major issue when you need a specific unit quickly. While desperately clicking on all my units looking for my sniper I got flanked and two Panzers swung around to ambush me. After losing half my units, I finally found my sniper dug into the ground behind some tree, virtually invisible. Thanks.

The missions themselves are almost entirely linear, with strict mission objectives and little room for exploration or error. Coupled with the finite unit distribution the missions quickly grow tiresome. Even the Grand Poobah, the D-Day landing itself, is one of the most aggravating missions. The game just tries to do too much at once without the means to do it. It is nearly impossibly to coordinate an attack on such a grand scale with a terribly uncooperative interface.

Sometimes gameplay may come second to some gamers. Pretty eye candy can divert attention away from poor mechanics just long enough to enter the sweet state of denial. But not this time. The game doesn't look awful, but by today's standards it is certainly lacking. The explosions and particle effects are pretty cool, but the animations are just terrible. This would be the one thing that keeps the game out of even mediocre status. Watching a soldier get shot 5 times in the face, only to instantly fall to the ground without any fluid movement whatsoever just makes you cringe. Jerky and poorly animated, the majority of the units are just plain ugly.

If the animations weren't enough to keep you at bay, perhaps the aural component of the game will make you take two steps back. I'm not going to sugarcoat this for you people: the voice acting is lame. It's hard to take a game seriously when your soldiers yell out "Dodge this if you can!" and "Ughhhhhhh, lousy Kraut!" I found myself sending my troops to their predictable demise at the hands of an MG-42 simply to hear them yell the hokey lines. The musical score is comprised of typical war fanfare and is generally appropriate. It neither adds nor detracts from the gameplay but it sometimes feels satirical that the game is taking itself that seriously.

The Verdict

The game is just plain boring. There are plenty of other real time strategy games out there that are better in every conceivable way. With titles like Codename: Panzers, Rome: Total War, Soldiers: Heroes of WWII and Ground Control II, players can get a much more satisfying all around experience, from gameplay to graphics.